


A Mile In The Medic's Boots

by AndreaLyn



Category: Black Hawk Down (2001)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-26
Updated: 2013-10-26
Packaged: 2017-12-30 12:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1018421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Schmid's experienced a lot of things out here in Mog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mile In The Medic's Boots

“Whoa,” Schmid blinks, his eyes fixated on the spilling gush of blood. “What have you got for me?”  
  
The first thing he focuses on is the wound, so it takes a second to realize that it’s Hoot; one of the D-boys that Schmid admires so much and has all too often caught himself watching in training to see how he moves, how he fights – tries to mimic that grace in his own steps and only gives up when things like that render themselves impossible. It’s his hands that have a grace and fluidity to them that no one else can muster and he wonders sometimes if any of the other Rangers in the barracks envy him for that.   
  
“Stray bullet from the market. Why don’t you patch it up real nice?” Hoot drawls, immediately kicking off his boots and lying down flat on his back atop Schmid’s medical table. The wound’s to the forearm and it’s gone straight through the skin, not even nicking the bone once. It’s either bad aim or good luck, or a little bit of both.   
  
“Did you shoot back?”  
  
“Yeah,” Hoot replies sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “I shot back in the middle of the hot zone.”  
  
“It was a valid question,” Schmid snaps back tersely. “Do you want me to patch this up or do you wanna do it yourself?”  
  
“Relax, Doc,” Hoot smirks. “Hey, you gonna do this quick? Sanderson wants to go shooting and I’m  _real_  hungry.” Schmid just raises his eyebrow, cleaning alcohol and clean cloth in hand. The bullet didn’t lodge at all and Schmid wonders just how many days Hoot is going to go before he gets hit somewhere that it’ll stick. Their bodies are made of water, muscle, bone, and for a lot of the guys here, they’re quickly earning tiny pieces of metal that eventually get plucked out.  
  
But the ghost pains stay, so he hears.  
  
Schmid finishes dressing the wound in record time, Hoot fidgeting under him the whole time.  
  
“Great!” he announces with a grin. “I’ll bring you back a boar of your own,” he winks and holsters his gun, already bounding out and heading for the barracks. “Sanderson! Durant! Let’s go!”  
  
*  
  
He tends to his own wounds whenever he can. It’s not that he hasn’t got trust – he has enough trust to place his very life in the hands of the man next to him. It’s more along the lines of him not wanting to be a bother. Why put measly little repairs on someone else’s shoulders when he’s perfectly capable of dressing a wound himself or prying a piece of metal or wood or whatever’s imbedded in there today from his hand. He’s not one to go running to someone else when the physical pain gets tough. He’s more likely to be eager for another case to write about in his medical journal so that when he gets back home, he can push it to the others in training and say, “See? Look. Look and see what I’ve treated.”  
  
He tends to his own wounds, and there’s never been anything serious. He still hasn’t been shot, hasn’t even taken shrapnel from a near blast, but he has felt the wounds of every man he’s treated. He’s taken their bullets when they do; he’s seen every injury and has gone through it with them as he patches them up.   
  
He treats it all and in the process, collects his own wounds through the absorption of his healing.   
  
*  
  
“Check-up,” Wolcott says and hops himself right down on the table, his attention still on Durant, he rolls up his sleeves and assumes the Elvis posture, mimicking the accent as Schmid picks up his stethoscope and suppresses the sigh that comes with the fact that they’re using him for physicals again. There had been a slight moment yesterday when he’d thought that it had been a one-off. “Let’s get this show on the road.”   
  
Schmid hates it when he’s taken away from curing people and put to work checking them out like a pediatrician; he’s trained for better than this. “Hey, how’d Goffena get outta this?” Wolcott grunts to Durant, who shrugs – his arms crossed as Schmid presses the stethoscope to Wolcott’s heart. “Hey, how about that being a little cold! Durant, you know what…”  
  
“No…no, I don’t know,” Durant replies evenly, the groan surfacing almost immediately.   
  
“Goffena didn’t get out of this,” Schmid mumbles to himself, the steady heartbeat echoing in his ears –  _thump, thump_ , blood circulating life to their most important resources, to the tactic that gets them in and out – while he checks Wolcott’s heart-pressure. “He was here yesterday,” he mumbles, counting beats, pumping air and cinching off the velcro wrap around Wolcott’s arm.   
  
“Oh, you know,” Wolcott grins, nudging Schmid in the arm. “C’mon, Doc. Tell him. Names are kosher.”  
  
“They are  _not_!” Durant replies incredulously. “You’re kidding me, you really are. It’s one of the oldest rules in the book. Doc, tell him. Names are not allowed in Scrabble.”  
  
Names. It’s funny too, because they’re dealing with nothing but losing themselves and their names out here. Names get truncated, names become nicknames and in the barracks – with the Rangers, mostly – your surname becomes your label. Sure, it’s what goes on their tags, but Schmid doesn’t remember signing up for this and one of the rules being, “you will heretofore never refer to your comrades by their first name in your own leisure time!” Schmid can’t really recall the last time someone called him Kurt. He thinks it was his Father, back when he last visited home, but that’s washed away.  
  
He’s the Doc, he’s Schmid. He’s the one who goes running when someone screams, “ **Medic!** ”  
  
“You’re fine,” Schmid gives Wolcott a pat on the back and gestures for Durant to take his place. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”  
  
*  
  
Beals shakes under his hands like a human earthquake; 8.0 on the Richter scale as he convulses in Schmid’s grasp. Human skin slipping out of his hands without the blood loosening his grip isn’t something that Schmid is used to and with every shake, every shudder, Schmid fears for the end, can see that ending before his eyes where Beals loses to the epilepsy.   
  
So Schmid holds on tight.  
  
“John…John!” he barks, slipping the two by three-inch piece of rubber someone’s handed him into Beals’ mouth. He’s a little late. Crimson trails of blood are already streaming down Beals’ chin, staining his lower face with the red rivers of an injury that Schmid couldn’t prevent, teeth sinking down into the soft flesh of Beals’ lower lip without even meaning to, without ever wanting to.   
  
Beals spasms and he writhes in Schmid’s grasp and for all the medals of honor in the world, Schmid can’t save him anymore, can’t save him so that he can fight in this place. There have been whispers of a mission, but John Beals isn’t going to participate.  
  
He’s going home. Schmid had known it the moment Beals had first started twisting and shifting in his grasp.  
  
*  
  
“Ow. Fuck, ow.”  
  
“What happened to that stoic attitude? What happened to, it ‘just needs some patching before sending me out’?” Schmid suppresses his smirk as he wraps the bandages around Sizemore’s arm, white cloth under his fingertips more familiar than the feel of human skin, only surpassed by the frightening familiarity of blood on his hands.   
  
“Yeah, well, broken arm. Which mission are they going to send me on now?” Sizemore mutters, his voice disappointed and bitter. “I hear we’re finally going out and I have to give up my place because of  _ping-pong_.” Schmid imagines that, imagines losing out on his chance because of cold, hard concrete breaking skin and bone with a sickening crunch in one split-second. He pushes away at that feeling of helplessness as he secures the last bandage in place, wishing it weren’t his hand precluding Sizemore from battle, his cast stopping him from fighting.  
  
“Hey,” Schmid taps him on his good arm. “Plenty of missions, yet,” he forces a soldier’s smile – brave and honest and trained to the point where it’s instinctive.  
  
*  
  
Blood in battle is warmer than it is in the barracks and it flows like life over his hands though he’d ask to take it back, though he’d beg and barter using his own life if he could only reverse every last death for every last man who has suffered and died while under his watch. So when he tries to breathe life back into Smith and nothing comes of it, he’s so sure now that the blood under his hands is going to run cold, is going to still.   
  
Smith’s death is going to weigh down hard on his mind for a good time, he’s sure of that; just like Smith’s blood, that will take too many cycles to wash out of his clothes and will never fully disappear from his mind. This mission, Schmid bled. This mission, he lost someone right in front of him, breathed life into him when he took his last breath, and still couldn’t save him.   
  
*  
  
When it’s Monday morning and the sun’s risen to a new week, Schmid still can’t sleep for fear of spending his dreams listening to the sound of Smith’s screams. He’s weighed down with one constant thought:   
  
The mission’s successful, but Schmid wasn’t. 


End file.
